Tips And Tricks

This page is meant as a container of tips and tricks collected over time, addressing topics and issues brought up by TDE users.

Upgrading from KDE3 or from TDE 3.5.x to R14.0.x

If you are migrating from KDE3 or upgrading from TDE 3.5.x, you can reuse your own settings in TDE R14.0.x. When logging into R14.0.x for the first time, TDE will automatically execute a script which will migrate as many of your KDE3/TDE3.5.x settings as possible. At the end of the process, your KDE3/TDE3.5.x profile will still exist (unchanged) and a new TDE profile will have been created inside the ~/.trinity folder.
NOTE
Please refrain from renaming your .kde into .trinity before running R14.0.x. If you do so, the migration process will not take part and some applications may not run smoothly after that. See here for an example of problems that may arise if you rename your .kde folder manually.

Using sudo and tdesudo

If you use sudo or a sudo-based distribution (such as Ubuntu), it is highly recommended that you install the tdesudo-trinity package as well. This allows to run programs that require root priviledge from the TDE menu using your own password. If tdesudo-trinity is not installed, you will be asked for the root password instead. More details can be found here

Removing captions from K-Menu

Add following line into section [menus] in file ~/.trinity/share/config/kickerrc

ShowMenuTitles=false

Adding a separator between windows button in the title bar

Open TDE Control Center -> Appearance & Themes -> Window Decorations and then select the "Buttons" tab.
In the middle of the screen there is a list of possible buttons. Drag a separator (--- spacer ---) on the title bar of the sample window, between the buttons where you want to space to appear.
Check the preview in the bottom part of the screen and modify again as required.
Confirm when done.

Log out of current TDE session

You can log out of the current TDE session and possibly shut down the system automaticly (depending on your TDE configuration) using this command:

dcop kdesktop default logout ["confirm" "type" "mode"]

You can append three parameters "confirm", "type", "mode" to determine the logout behaviour according to the following values:

First parameter "confirm"

-1 -- Obey the user's confirmation setting

0 -- Don't confirm, shutdown without asking

1 -- Always confirm, ask even if the user turned it off

Second parameter "type"

-1 -- Select previous action or the default if it's the first time

0 -- Only log out

1 -- Log out and reboot the machine

2 -- Log out and halt the machine

Third parameter "mode"

-1 -- Select previous mode or the default if it's the first time

0 -- Schedule a shutdown (halt or reboot) for the time all active sessions have exited

1 -- Shut down, if no sessions are active. Otherwise do nothing

2 -- Force shutdown. Kill any possibly active sessions

3 -- Pop up a dialog asking the user what to do if sessions are still active

Full stop example Don't ask, log out and halt machine, killing any sessions

dcop ksmserver default logout 0 2 2